37 Answers
37

The phrase "Here Be Dragons" (or hic sunt dracones) appears on maps such as the Lenox Globe (from early 1500s) and is now considered to be map shorthand for Here Be Other Stuff We Don't Quite Know About, rather than a claim to have seen a fire-breathing monster.

Usually placed to fill whitespace (un-known uncharted lands or seas) on old maps.

I always thought there was a cartographic streak in the writers of the TV show Blackadder.

As the Elizabethan Blackadder is preparing to sail around the world he's told:

The foremost cartographers of the land
have prepared this for you; it's a map
of the area that you'll be traversing.
[Blackadder opens it up and sees it is
blank] -They'll be very grateful if
you could just fill it in as you go
along.

As WWI Blackadder is crossing no-mans land to spy on the Germans:

Blackadder: Now, where the hell
are we?

George: Well, it's difficult
to say, we appear to have crawled
into an area marked with mushrooms.

Blackadder: [patiently] What do
those symbols denote?

George: It says "mine". So,
these mushrooms must belong to the man
who made the map.

A number of astronauts, and then all
of us who saw the photography from
space, marveled at how much the
Florida peninsula, meandering
Mississippi, the islands of Britain,
and the boot of Italy resembled the
maps everyone had grown up with. We
had taken it for granted that maps
were faithful reflections of reality;
but we were somehow amazed when
reality turned out to be true to the
maps.

"We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. Now let me ask you another question. What is the smallest world you would care to inhabit?"

Geography has been described as the
Los Angeles among academic disciplines
because it spreads over a very wide
area, merges with its neighbours, and
we have a hard time finding the
central business area.

How about the appearance of the (fictional) 'Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality' in Season 2 of West Wing? (link to a 4 min clip on you tube) They lobby for the replacement of Mercator Projection maps in schools with Peters Projection maps.

JOSH ...you’re telling me that Germany isn’t where we think it is?

FALLOW Nothing’s where you think it is.

C.J.
Where is it?

FALLOW
I’m glad you asked. [brings up a new map, which has its continents significantly squished
northward] The Peters Projection.

...

C.J.
What the hell is that?

FALLOW
It’s where you’ve been living this whole time. Should we continue?

Then they continue with a short discussion about map projections and social equality.

"one would have to be singularly unimaginative to experience no excitement when confronted with a map, not least a map of unfamiliar territory studded with exotic names"

by Cordelia Oliver, 1989

And the stat of this one has been mentioned but I thought I'd post the fuller version:

"I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the standing stone or the druidic circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with"